IS GEORGE BUSH A VERY WEIRD FORM OF GOD’S GRACE?

These are dark times we are living through. At times such as these, to quote the great doctor of the soul, C. G. Jung, “Something of the abysmal darkness of the world has broken in on us, poisoning the very air we breathe and befouling the pure water with the stale, nauseating taste of blood.”

I feel in shock about what has happened in the election. I see the part of me that wants to deny to myself the horror, the absolute nightmare that is happening. It’s like I have a part that wants to look away, that wants to pretend that what happened in the election isn’t really that bad. I find myself fantasizing that maybe Bush will have a radical shift in attitude and start making policy decisions based on what is good for the greatest number of people, instead of for an elected few.
It is really that bad, however, and that is the point. We have dreamed ourselves into a sci-fi nightmare, and there is no avoiding it. In essence, there is a part of me that is in a form of trauma. I am not presently able to wrap my mind around and integrate the darkness that has befallen our country. I feel numb, dissociated and dis-empowered. I feel like screaming. I am completely appalled and horrified that supposedly close to sixty million of my fellow countrymen and women actually voted for someone who from my point of view is criminally insane. What does this tell us about the state of consciousness of our fellow citizens? I don’t understand how anyone can even question that there’s a collective psychosis ravaging our country. What more evidence do we need?

I am left with the overwhelming feeling that the election was only a staged election, an appearance of an election which had been rigged from the beginning. Is there anyone naïve enough who doubts that the voting process in our country has been co-opted and corrupted? Most people I speak to who recognize this just tend to look away with a “what can I do?” shrug of the shoulders, as if they’ve resigned themselves to their fate. The whole situation is horrifying.

I find myself looking away from seeing that it is as if some non-local evil force has gotten its tentacles far enough into the fabric of our country that it controls not just the presidency and both houses of congress, but every other aspect of our country that it needs to in order to have power over us. Our corrupt corporate government complex controls the judicial branch, so we therefore can’t deal with our corrupt government through the legal system, as the government controls the courts. The checks and balances that were established by the constitution and built into our government has been disabled and effectively abolished. The corrupt corporate government complex also owns and controls the very media which is supposed to keep it in balance. It has now become obvious that the corrupt corporate government monster controls the process of voting itself, so we are even unable to vote the criminal perpetrators out of office. And now the takeover is complete, as it controls the minds of millions of our populace, too. Maybe all of this has been the case for awhile and I’m simply recognizing it now.

It is shattering to realize that our grand experiment of democracy has, for the time being, failed. It is like realizing that a demon has entered into our home and it has gotten itself too deeply entrenched to be removed through the normal channels. In other words, it’s not that our corrupt corporate government complex is planning to turn our country into a fascist state, it already has succeeded in doing this and most of us haven’t seemed to notice.

I see the part of myself that says, no, it can’t be happening here. I see the part of me that looks away from how similar what is happening is to what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Germans who lived through that time in Germany say it was like watching one law after another subtly being changed, as their civil liberties were slowly taken away. No one stood up because everyone was still comfortable in their inertia and their denial. They were like frogs in water that was getting hotter, but they didn’t even notice the changes in the temperature until it was too late, and they got boiled to death. This is our situation right now, and we the people need to realize this before it is too late. Like Jung says “We are in the soup that is going to be cooked for us, whether we claim to have invented it or not.”

Times such as these, when the opposites are totally polarized, are apocalyptic, end-times. We are living in a time in which a deeper process that has been unfolding since the birth of human history is emerging and becoming visible. The word apocalypse means something hidden being revealed. What is being revealed is the dark or the hidden God, the shadow side of God, so to speak. Interestingly, the inner meaning of the word Satan is “shadow of the Lord.” It is as if the evil that was operating underground and hiding in the shadows is revealing itself and has become visible for all who have eyes to see. To quote Jung “God asserts his power through the revelation of his darkness and destructiveness. Man is merely instrumental in carrying out the divine plan.”

We have all gotten drafted into playing roles in a deeper, mythic, archetypal drama, what Jung would call a “divine drama of incarnation.” This deeper archetypal process has endlessly re-created itself all throughout history. If Bush and Cheney weren’t around, for example, there would have been others to get dreamed up to pick up these roles, as these are archetypal roles that exist deep inside the psyche of every one of us. Our country is unconsciously playing out a deeper, archetypal pattern that has previously resulted in the self-destruction of many powerful civilizations throughout history. Becoming conscious of the deeper archetypal process that is collectively playing itself out through us unconsciously, however, is the very act that effects its transformation, and enables us to collaboratively channel this energy constructively.

The ‘daemonic’ is a transpersonal energy that is supraordinate to us, which means it is a power that is mightier than us and can thereby overpower us. The daemonic can possess an individual or a group, thereby giving shape and form to itself as it acts itself out through those who unwittingly fall asleep and become its agents. To quote Jung “the daemonic is that moment when an unconscious content of seemingly overwhelming power appears on the threshold of consciousness. It can cross this threshold and seize hold of the personality [of the individual or group]. Then it is possession.” As Jung points out, when a daemonic energy is ready to be integrated, it always appears physically, “since it forces the subject into its own form,” or we could say gets ‘dreamed up into materialization.’ What this means is that the full-bodied playing out of archetypal evil such as we have on the world stage right now is initiatory and is itself an expression that something is being shown to us and is available for assimilation. Encoded, in hidden ‘symbolic’ form, in the revelation of the darkness itself is the key to its own re-solution and transcendence. This is why Jung questions whether “in this very power of evil God might not have placed some special purpose which it is most important for us to know.”

Jung defines the daemonic as the “not yet made real creative,” by which he is pointing at that if gotten in conscious relationship with, the daemonic contains our highest creativity and genius. If not related to consciously, however, the daemonic possesses us from behind and beneath our conscious awareness and acts itself out through us in a destructive way that is truly ‘demonic.’ Whether the darkness destroys us or unfolds its blessings depends on no one but ourselves.

Everything depends on if we can have the expansion of consciousness that the darkness itself is demanding of us. To quote Jung, “the only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands.” Even though Jung died over forty years ago, it is as if he is describing our current world situation. This is because Jung was articulating in his day the same archetypal pattern that is re-enacting itself today.

The fact that evil is incarnating in this world of ours is itself an expression that light is nearby, for shadows are nothing other than expressions of light. To quote Jung “We like to imagine that God is all light, but St. John of the Cross [author of The Dark Night of the Soul} has the truly psychological notion of the darkness and seeming remoteness of God as an effect of the divine presence.” Demons are actually blessings in drag. It is darkest right before the dawn. Right before a demon gets vanquished is when it makes its worst destructive outburst. This is because the demon can’t stand and will violently resist the light of consciousness, for to be seen de-potentiates and exorcises the demon, so to speak. Once the evil is seen, however, it loses its power and control over us, as it can no longer act itself out through us.

Lucifer, which means ‘the bringer of light,’ is the necessary dark side of life, of shadow revealing light by contrast. Jung goes so far as to point out that Lucifer was “necessary and indeed indispensable for the unfolding and completion of the divine drama.” Jung even refers to Satan as “the godfather of man as a spiritual being,” by which he means that the appearance of evil can activate in humankind a process of spiritual awakening.

We are not in a position to judge or to know God’s secret intentions. It is clearly God’s will that George Bush be president, as it IS what is happening. It could be that George Bush needed to get re-elected, because if John Kerry got elected, maybe people would fall back to sleep, thinking everything was O. K. I find myself imagining, however, that the evil that is enacting itself through George Bush will activate a collective awakening unimaginable before Bush came on the scene. I imagine that with George Bush as president we the people will connect with each other in lucid awareness, and tap into how we can, in real time, the present moment, creatively and collaboratively effect real change in this world of ours.

The antonym and antidote to the “diabolic,’ whose inner meaning is that which separates and divides, is the ‘symbolic,’ whose inner meaning is that which unites. Symbols are the language of dreams. To connect in symbolic awareness is to realize that we are all collaboratively dreaming up this universe together, which is the very revelation that the universe itself is symbolically reflecting back to us. If this is a mass shared dream then we are not separate from each other but are all interconnected parts of one another and are all on the same side. Once we recognize this, we can get in phase with each other, connecting our lucidity together as we unite as one, co-operatively transmuting this archetypal, daemonic energy into our highest creative inspiration and genius. Having Bush as president might precipitate a radical, revolutionary, evolutionary and epochal quantum leap in human consciousness undreamed of until now. I find myself wondering, maybe George Bush getting elected is an actual blessing in a very convincing disguise that it’s not.